Free Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

wandered from one briskly occupied luncher to the next, Harriet kept on asking herself, Which? Which of all these normal and cheerful-looking women had dropped that unpleasant paper in the quad the night before? Because you never knew; and the trouble of not knowing was that you dimly suspected everybody. Haunts of ancient peace were all very well, but very odd things could crawl and creep beneath lichen-covered stones. The Warden in her great carved chair was bending her stately head and smiling at some jest of the Dean’s. Miss Lydgate was attending, with eager courtesy, to the wants of a very old student indeed, who was almost blind. She had helped her stumbling feet up the three steps of the dais, fetched her lunch from the hatch and was now putting salad on her plate for her. Miss Stevens the Bursar and Miss Shaw the Modern Language Tutor had collected about them three other old students of considerable age and attainments; their conversation was animated and apparently amusing. Miss Pyke, the Classical Tutor, was deep in a discussion with a tall, robust woman whom Phoebe Tucker had recognised and pointed out to Harriet as an eminent archaeologist, and in a momentary flash of comparative silence, the Tutor’s high voice rang out unexpectedly: “The cumulus at Halos appears to be an isolated instance. The cist-graves of Theotokou...” Then the clamour again closed over the argument. Two other dons whom Harriet did not recognise (they were new since her day) appeared from their gestures to be discussing millinery. Miss Hillyard, whose sarcastic tongue tended to isolate her from her colleagues, was slowly eating tier lunch and glancing at a pamphlet she had brought in with her. Miss de Vine, arriving late, sat down beside Miss Hillyard and began to consume ham in a detached way with her eyes fixed on vacancy.
    Then the Old Students in the body of the Hall—all types, all ages, all varieties of costume. Was it the curious round-shouldered woman in a yellow djibbah and sandals, with her hair coiled in two snail-shells over her ears? Or the sturdy, curly-headed person in tweeds, with a masculine-looking waistcoat and the face like the back of a cab? Or the tightly-corseted peroxide of sixty, whose hat would better have suited an eighteen-year-old debutante at Ascot? Or one of the innumerable women with “school-teacher” stamped on their resolutely cheery countenances? Or the plain person of indeterminate age who sat at the head of her table with the air of a chairman of committee? Or that curious little creature dressed in unbecoming pink, who looked as though she had been carelessly packed away in a drawer all winter and put into circulation again without being ironed? Or that handsome, well-preserved business woman of fifty with the well-manicured hands, who broke into the conversation of total strangers to inform them that she had just opened a new hairdressing establishment “just off Bond Street”? Or that tall, haggard, tragedy-queen in black silk marocain who looked like Hamlet’s aunt, but was actually Aunt Beatrice who ran the Household Column in the Daily Mercury? Or the bony woman with the long horse face who had devoted herself to Settlement work? Or even that unconquerably merry and bright little dumpling of a creature who was the highly-valued secretary of a political secretary and had secretaries under her? The faces came and went, as though in a dream, all animated, all inscrutable.
    Relegated to a remote table at the lower end of the Hall were half-a-dozen present students, still lingering in Oxford for viva voce examinations. They babbled continually among themselves, rather obviously ignoring the invasion of their college by all these quaint old freaks who were what they themselves would be in ten years’ time, or twenty or thirty. They were a badly-turned-out bunch, Harriet thought, with an end-of-term crumpled appearance. There was an odd, shy-faced, sandy girl with pale eyes and restless